Old Hollywood's Cautionary Tale

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Elizabeth Short aka The Black Dahlia.

The 1947 murder of The Black Dahlia has remained one of Hollywood's most haunting unsolved cases.  The LAPD has passed down the cold case from detective to detective for over 50 years, making it Los Angeles' most infamous unsolved murder.

The Black Dahlia was actually Elizabeth "Bette" Short.  She was a 22-year-old beautiful, aspiring actress living in various hotels, boarding houses, and apartments in the months before her death.  According to friends and family, Short moved to L.A. from Florida in July 1946 after her boyfriend who was a Major in the 2nd Air Commandos had been killed in action.

She came to Los Angeles to see an old boyfriend she had met during World War 2.  He was stationed in Long Beach.  For the next six months, Short stayed in various places throughout Los Angeles and San Diego, never in one place for more than a week.  Her last known residence was in Hollywood where she shared a room with four other girls. 

Short's dream of becoming an actress had actually paid off to some degree.  According to police, she appeared in a few films, but ultimately paid her rent through waitressing or as a cashier.  Many of those interviewed by police in the aftermath of her murder spoke of her as beautiful, glamorous and likeable.

Many have come to see the last days of Elizabeth Short's life as a cautionary fable of a bygone era.  The seedy underbelly of Hollywood and Los Angeles in the 1940's provides a backdrop for what would happen to the young Black Dahlia on January 15, 1947.

A Gruesome Discovery

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Another image of Elizabeth Short.

According to police reports, Short took a bus to San Diego on December 8, 1946 and was befriended by Dorothy French.  Bette stayed with the French family until January 8, 1947 when she left San Diego with Robert Manley, a salesman from Los Angeles she had met just two weeks before. 

Manley brought Short back to Los Angeles on January 9, 1947.  He left her at the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles.  Police say that the lobby of the hotel was the last place anyone ever saw Elizabeth Short alive.

Six days later, a mother pushing her child in a stroller came upon what she originally thought was a mannequin in a vacant lot in southeast Los Angeles.  Shocked by what she saw, the woman called the police from a neighbor's house. 

Police found Elizabeth Short's mutilated body severed in half at the waist, then carefully positioned in the tall grass and weeds on the vacant lot.  Some parts of her body were cut with surgeon-like precision.  An autopsy showed  that she had died of shock from a concussion and loss of blood.  Medical examiners say that her body had been practically drained of all blood and that it was likely scrubbed in a bathtub before each of the halves were placed at the vacant lot just hours after she died.

The discovery of Elizabeth Short's body, or the Black Dahlia as she would be coined by the press posthumously, would begin LAPD's most notorious investigation and one that would last over fifty years.

New Leads In A New Century

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The marriage certificate Larry Harnisch used to tie William Bayley to the Black Dahlia.

For years, the LAPD would follow every lead and question everyone who knew Elizabeth Short.  After Robert Manley's alibi checked out and he passed a polygraph test, police looked at everyone from surgeons to the nightclub owner Mark Hansen, who had once rented a room to Short. 

While cranks and confessions poured in to newspapers and to law enforcement, police believed that the killer mailed a letter containing Short's purse contents to a Los Angeles newspaper days after her body was found. 

While every lead and every suspect was checked out, nothing conclusive ever came from the murder investigation.  However, recently LAPD Detective Brian Carr and LA Times reporter Larry Harnisch believe that they may have stumbled upon a new lead in the Black Dahlia investigation.

Harnisch's research revealed a major clue found on a marriage document.  The document included an address one block south of the vacant lot where The Black Dahlia was found.  The man living at the address was a surgeon named Dr. Walter Bayley. 

Bayley's daughter was a friend of Elizabeth Short's sister Virginia and brother-in-law Adrian, and had served as the matron of honor at their wedding.  Harnisch now had a suspect with proximity to the crime, a personal link to Short, and a reputation for being a gifted surgeon who could easily have enacted the gruesome surgical-like murder.

Harnisch claims that the doctor had begun acting erratically due to a degenerative brain disease which would not be diagnosed until after his death.  Bayley also had a mistress who ultimately received his estate instead of his wife.  According to Harnisch, Bayley's widow always felt that her husband was being blackmailed by the mistress with some deep, dark secret. 

Harnisch believes that Bayley's deteriorating mental condition may have also made him prone to violence. 

LAPD Detective Brian Carr agrees that Bayley is a possible suspect but also hopes that  DNA evidence can help break the Dahlia case.  Carr believes that a letter believed to have been sent by the killer contains trace DNA evidence in the form of the killer's saliva used to close the envelope.  That trace evidence could be used to name the killer given the recent advances in DNA testing.  The only problem is that the envelope and letter have gone missing from an evidence locker.  Cops believe someone took them as a souvenir.

For over 50 years, the puzzling circumstances surrounding Elizabeth Short's brutal death have intrigued and mystified the citizens of Los Angeles and beyond.  Now, a new generation of detectives with new leads and technology are hopeful that The Black Dahlia case will soon be solved.